A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [432]
38.8 In contrast to “plain and quiet Lord Lyons,” Bruce was “white-haired, white-whiskered, round-cheeked, with rich dark eyes, hearty, [and] convivial,” wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, the future Supreme Court justice. Bruce was a clever choice as minister; his successful partnership with Anson Burlingame, the U.S. minister in China, had already made him popular with the administration. Moreover, Bruce liked Americans, having served on a previous diplomatic mission to Washington in 1842; he felt comfortable among them, preferring the raw energy of the New World to the stuffy hauteur of the Old. Holmes was amazed to discover that Bruce was “pretty freely outspoken for our side as if he were one of us.”49
Epilogue
Going home, staying on—A transatlantic cable—The Alabama claims—Sumner’s demands—Impasse—Last chance at Geneva—Conclusion
On May 23, 1865, more than 150,000 soldiers began marching down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House in a grand review of the Union armies. The parade lasted for two days, and even then the spectators lining the route saw but a fraction of the victorious Northern forces. General Ulysses S. Grant—who would succeed Andrew Johnson as president in 1868—was now the commander in chief of the largest army in the world, with 1,034,064 soldiers at his disposal.1
Yet a mere eighteen months later, Grant’s forces would consist of just 54,302 men in the regular U.S. Army, and 11,000 (most of whom were U.S. Colored troops) in the volunteer army.2 The navy was also shrinking, selling its warships as quickly as the market allowed, until by 1870 only 52 of the original 641 vessels remained.3 The rapid pace of demobilization reflected the country’s desperate yearning for peace. In the aftermath of the war, a different kind of volunteer stepped forward, one motivated by a sense of debt to the nation’s fallen, whose mission was not to kill but to collect statistics, identify remains, and reinter in military cemeteries thousands of rotting and neglected corpses.4 The renowned Civil War nurse Clara Barton founded the Office of Correspondence to help families in their search for soldiers who were missing and presumed dead.5 A total of 360,222 Federal soldiers were known to have died during the four years of the war, and another 271,175 had been injured or maimed. To Colonel L.D.H. Currie, the British commander of the 133rd New York Metropolitan Guard, this terrible human toll meant the loss of all but one of the regiment’s founding officers. To the former British prisoner Private James Pendlebury of the 69th New York Irish Regiment, it meant returning to his regiment after ten months in captivity to find that he recognized less than half the faces.
The demobilized forces benefited from a steady economy and abundant land. The continuous influx of immigrants during the war—more than 800,000 by most accounts—had not crowded out the labor pool, and many of the British volunteers, including Colonel Currie, saw America as offering greater opportunities than the old country.6 The errant father Private James Horrocks would not have returned to England even if he could have. He stayed in the U.S. Army until November 1865, by which time he had earned both the officer’s commission he coveted and a considerable sum of money. “I have paid all my debts,” he wrote to his family on the twenty-seventh, “bought … an excellent suit of citizen’s clothes and everything I stood in need of and have still above $400 left.” Horrocks joined the million-plus veterans who sought to make new lives for themselves after their wartime experiences. But his hopes of making a fortune were never quite realized: he married a woman from California, settled